Rebel Flesh first impressions

Unless Part 2 really impresses in two weeks, consider this a snarky preview of the whole thing.

"Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard."
-Deckard, Blade Runner

The premise of this episode relies on artificial people, the age-old fallback of a bored uninspired sci-fi author looking to try to make a clever take on the old "robot rebellion" story.

It's the future, and a bunch of "Gangers" - remote-controlled carbon copies of people - are digging for acid beneath a monastery. If we ever figure out why, it was edited out of the BBC America version, which is unfortuantely all I have to go on at the moment. (Incidentally, BBCA shot itself in the foot here by airing ads for an upcoming showing of Blade Runner during this episode, hence all the references.) To relate to us that nobody thinks at all about these things, the episode opens with one of then getting "decomissioned" in a vat of acid, only for its replacement to show up afterward and snark at his co-workers about it. It's only marginally more subtle than calling them "skin-jobs," as Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica do. The Doctor arrives and explains the whole thing for the benefit of the slow, and then there's a massive solar storm and everyone gets knocked out for an hour.

(I'm tempted to say that the TNG episode this rips off the most is "Measure of a Man," the one where Data gets put on trial to determine whether he's sentient or not, and that's a close second. The actual closest TNG analogue is "Clues," in which some very important things happen during a gap in everyone's memories that is much longer than anyone first suspects.)

(I'm also tempted to say the version of the Doctor who got shot on the beach in "The Impossible Astronaut" might have been a Ganger, but I kind of doubt that Moffat would resort to a bailout that crass. Please don't make me eat those words this October...)

"Memories. You're talking about memories."
-Dekard, Blade Runner

When they come to, they quickly discover that some members of the mining crew have been replaced by Gangers. The Doctor sympathizes with the Gangers because a) they have memories and therefore souls - somehow, and b) because this is exactly the sort of thing he's been known for doing since 1970, when the show lost its black-and-white morality along with its black-and-white video. There's an entire scene built around the Doctor and company discovering that these things have memories and, sadly, Blade Runner did it better. For those of you who don't know, Blade Runner is a cult film from 1982 - by "cult," I mean it's awkwardly paced, has one of the most uncomfortable romantic subplots I've ever seen, and was savaged by the critics when it came out, but it nonetheless has a following. Don't get me wrong, it has a lot going for it, but the only thing that makes its pacing better than that of 2001: A Space Odyssey is the fact that Blade Runner doesn't have an overture or intermission. It's about a man who may or may not be an android (the evidence changes with each re-release) hunting down a bunch of androids while at the same time falling in love with yet another android. These are not "artificial people" like Data from TNG or even Ash and Bishop from the Alien films - they're the closest things Karel Capek's robots from Rossum's Universal Robots have ever gotten to appearing on screen (at the time; we've since had the Cylons in BSG). Flesh and blood all the way through, they're completely indistinguishable from human beings, except that they're supposedly completely sociopathic - ironic, then, that the relationship between two of the antagonists seems a lot more stable than the one between Deckard and his love interest.

And, yes, it's unfair to compare a television episode to a cult sci-fi film (except that, once again, Battlestar Galactica pulled it off), but as characters, Batty and Pris seem a hell of a lot better fleshed out (sorry, no pun intended) than any of the orange-shirts this week. Blade Runner is perhaps a film with the focus on the wrong character, as Batty's desperate quest to increase his four-year lifespan (which concludes with him murdering "God") is altogether more interesting than Deckard's quest to "retire" a bunch of fugitives. "The Rebel Flesh" doesn't really offer us any compelling reason to sympathize with either side. The supporting cast don't even have the amount of character development that the crowd in "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" got - and, arguably, they need it here more than there. We knew the Doctor was going to get cloned because the Doctor poked at the Flesh, but for this story to have any real dramatic weight, what it needed was a clone of Amy or Rory. Especially of Rory. He hasn't died enough this season.

"Have you ever retired a human by mistake?"
-Rachel, Blade Runner

You sometimes get some help in figuring out who's what because the Gangers' faces occasionally look more... plastic, molded, artificial, what have you. Which would normally be fine, except that there's already a pretty egregious unfinished-looking face... on the leading man. (What they have to resort to when the Doctor's double shows up boggles the mind.)

And there's another, more serious problem (Matt's face is fine, honest - I couldn't resist pointing that out, though). Amy and Rory don't wake up in the same room as we last saw them, so there's really no guarantee that the Amy and Rory we follow around for the remainder of the episode are real. When Rory and one of the Gangers get separated from the group, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether the person we're watching at this particular moment is a Ganger or not.

(BBCA also showed ads for Battlestar Galactica during this episode. I knew fantastically little about that show when I wrote the bulk of this review, which is admittedly kind of silly since Ron Moore used to write for DS9. But I can't help but feel that commercials for yet another "rediculously human robot" premise really didn't help this episode.)

Oh, and just to round it out - faceless corporation employs an army of clones in a hostile work environment? Moon. So, yeah, most of this episode, it seems, originated somewhere else. And the most notable part that didn't - the Doctor climbing a power during the middle of a solar event - reeked uncomfortably of "Evolution of the Daleks."

Bottom line: between the tired premise and the unintentional difficulties involved in telling who's a Ganger and who's not, Part 2 had better impress, or this is going to end up getting the worst rating thus far in Matt Smith's run.